With the development of modern communication technology, people can communicate with each other in many diversified ways, from fixed-line phones and mobile phones for voice communication, to Emails and mobile Emails mainly for text communication, to instant messages (IMs) which combine voice, text, and even image communication; and from the BBS Forums of Web1.0 to the multimedia-filled Blogs of Web 2.0. Meanwhile, various communication modes are becoming gradually integrated. For example, a subscriber can now conduct voice communication, Email sending and receiving, and IM communication all through one mobile terminal. In addition, one can even achieve information communication through various data services like mobile Blogs, picture Blogs, and Podcasts.
Relevant data show that, under current conditions, on average 170 million call records are produced each month in a district with 700,000 GSM subscribers. This interpersonal communication builds a huge social relationship network, and at the same time, such communication contains abundant communication subscriber description information reflecting the characteristics and requirements of the subscribers. For example, when a subscriber regularly dials the service hotline of a securities company, it can be deduced that the subscriber is possibly a shareholder. Thus products about investment and financing might well interest the subscriber. Therefore, certain attributes of the securities company can be transferred to the subscriber. In today's user-centered society, one extremely significant issue is how to obtain communication subscriber description information.
In another aspect, Ontology has become a hot-point in research at home and abroad, and its applications appear in various fields. The study of Ontology is focused on knowledge engineering, ontology engineering, information organization and retrieval, and semantic Web. Various ontology languages and ontology creation tools are being gradually developed and utilized. For example, Protégé is a free and open-source ontology editor and knowledge management platform developed by Medical Information Center of Stanford University School of Medicine. Jena is a development kit from the HP Company for the application of semantic network-oriented ontology parsing and rule reasoning, and its content is comprehensive. As for ontology languages, Web Ontology Language (OWL) has become a recommended standard for World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It has become a trend to use Ontology in traditional and emerging industries.
Ontology is applied in the communication world to describe the attribute characteristics of each communication subject using ontology languages, thereby capturing the transferring of the attribute characteristics in a social network. This is significant for obtaining the description information of subscribers functioning as main communication subjects.
Besides launching a 1 G mailbox to serve the subscribers, the Gmail service of Google company further built a subscriber relationship network through recommendations among net-friends, so as to obtain information such as social relationships of the subscribers, thereby generating some communication subscriber description information. In the early stage, new subscribers of Gmail could only obtain mailbox accounts through the invitations of old subscribers. Thereby, a social network is built by social relationship attributes of the subscribers collected through invitation authorities among net-friends. However, in practice, an old subscriber of Gmail may not only invite his friends. When Gmail first appeared, many Gmail owners sold their invitation authority in public on the Internet, and after Gmail became popular, it became easy to obtain Gmail invitations through the Internet. As a result, the social relationship information built on the basis of invitation authorities is not accurate. In other words, the generated communication subscriber description information is inaccurate.
Another method for generating communication subscriber description information is shown below. The Email sending and receiving records of a subscriber are analyzed by a server to obtain the information of which type of Email addresses the subscriber contacts, and thus the subscriber description information can be generated according to the Email addresses information. However, Email providers can only build a simple contact network by analyzing the Email sending and receiving records. Such inadequate communication subscriber description information may not truly reflect the characteristics and requirements of the subscriber, and thus is inaccurate.